Voice Peering Forum Update

I am at the closing plenary of the Voice Peering Forum in SanFrancisco. It has been a very interesting two days with a lot of informative and thought provoking conversations and presentations. The Voice Peering Fabric made two very notable announcements today. First the VPF is opening up its ENUM directory to the public Internet. Previously, the VPF ENUM registry has been limited to users of the VPF private ethernet network. Now common route discovery between networks on the VPF and public Internet is possible. More importantly, however, the VPF ENUM registry is no longer just a simple open database. The VPF ENUM registry users can now define the groups of users that have access to their ENUM entries - similar to the features offer by other ENUM solutions such as NetNumber.

The second announcement from the VPF was the launch of the VPF Automated Trading Platform (ATP) which enables a VPF user to define and control a hosted least cost routing and settlement solution. Users will deposit funds with the ATP which will automatically execute clearing and settlement of funds between peering partners.

In many respects, the VPF initiative is similar to Arbinet's VoIP peering service, however, their is one big difference. The VPF ENUM registry and ATP is completely free for VPF users. Automated clearing and settlement of VoIP peering transactions seems like a major infrastructure service that will have a material expense. Nevertheless the folks at the VPF feel confident that the float of prepaid deposits plus the addition of new VPF business will pay for the services